MagmaHound's Strategy Guides/Walls, Just Walls
__NOEDITSECTION__ Hi , so this is my guide on Walls. Yes, that thing over there. ---> The Absolute Don'ts on Walls These rules are perhaps absolutely, 100% no-nos, regardless of TH and whatnot dependent factors. Neglecting your Walls Don't end up like any TH10 you see in Silver/Bronze that has level 1 Walls. Those guys are hopeless. Despite their rushing efforts to get the Infernos or whatnot, you must not end up like this guy shown in the picture over there ---> Neglecting Walls at lower TH levels (TH 1-5) may not be too much of a problem, but not building those Walls are. But make sure you don't neglect your Walls afterwards! Do make sure they are at least the level shown in this chart: If any of your Walls are classifed under the red-zone (new Walls from new THs are exempt), do upgrade them ASAP or you will suffer badly both in your normal village and in wars. If your Walls are in the orange zone, do try to get them upgraded when you have the spare time for it. Anything above, congratulations, your Walls are decent, but if it's in the yellow zone (all zones marked Meh), then do try to get your Walls up, they're still pretty cheap (for your TH level anyways). Surrounding the Whole Base with a single layer of Wall This is a really common mistake made by many TH5-7s. Although it is nearly impossible to not do that until TH4, there are some players who encompass literally everything in their base. This is frowned upon because once any Wall is breached, you have literally free rein to everything inside the base. I have personally given an example build of such a TH5 person using TH9 buildings, because I have TH9 buildings :P And it's clear to see that you shouldn't do such a thing with your Walls now. As you can see, surrounding the base means that your defenses are technically all in one compartment. What that means is free rein to Giants, Barbarians, etc. Despite optimal trap placement (not shown here), such a base can be 2 or 3-starred regularly by their simlar TH leveled counterparts, whilst stealing most of the storages. Also, a single 3x3 gap is extremely possible with this kind of layout, especially when the space created by the walls are more than the buildings needed to fill it. Even with a Giant Bomb or Tesla on each of these "spawnholes", it is easily countered through smart trap triggering and correct means of blackhole aversion (i.e. using Rage to clear them out). Many layers of Walls protecting something Look at that layout over there! At least 4-5 layers of Walls protecting and some defenses covering all the storages! Cool right? I mean, they practically cannot touch those resources with super-strong Walls standing in their way, is that correct? Definitely not. At the mid-levels where things like this is definitely possible (TH7-8), air troops like Minions can definitely breach into the center after the other outside defenses are taken down by troops like Balloons and Giants. Even then, ever since ground troops worked together to deal with walls, it becomes much harder as they work down those walls faster. Although Wall Breakers might breach only a few layers of Wall, all their work is focused on the giant bulky layer of Walls and not separate ones. Following the Jump Spell's introduction at TH9, breaching the compartment with ground troops became a whole lot easier. A well-placed Jump spell will negate most, if not all of these layers of Walls. Doing such a thing shown in the picture at high-level will open you up to easier ground attacks, as an expense of only 23, 27 or 31 thousand Elixir may lead to losses of up to 400 thousand each of Gold and Elixir. In higher leagues, protecting buildings like this will open you up to easy Barch attacks for at least 70-80% damage plus ''the Town Hall if you kicked it outside. If the attacker also has good heroes it can be a free 3-star victory. GoWiPe/other trophy-pushing strats can easily wreck such a base as well, even with the Town Hall inside. Debatable Points on Walls Some people say it's a don't, yet some people say it's a great tactic and implement them. These are points on Walls that you can have an opinion on - feel free to agree or disagree with doing this. Doubled Walls So this layout is decently common no matter where you are, from the unknowns of sub-200 to the southern teasers of Champion. Usually these doubled walls will be on one side or one area of the base. '''Pros of Doubled Walls:' *More layers to break through in order to enter the compartment, while leaving enough walls for other compartments and stuff *Anti-Barch if the attacker does not have Wall Breakers (Archers will have same line of fire with Barbarians , so Mortars/Wizard Towers can hit them together) *Will usually not be attacked if used correctly as Wall Breakers prefer targeting single walls over double; this can be used to protect a compartment from Wall Breakers Cons of Doubled Walls: *Wall Breakers can damage both layers if they target the double layer *Less walls for other compartments; this means less compartments meaning an easier time for Giants, etc. *Jump Spells can always negate the daunting-ness of double walls; it's detrimental as less compartments (explained earlier) means easier maneuvering inside the base My opinion on them, there's definitely a use for double walls, but if you are tripling them or more, it's kind of a waste of wall there. If you use them correctly, then they'll serve you well. How to use Doubled Walls correctly: Try not to waste them like Figure 1 '''illustrates over there. In that figure, because Wall Breakers '''prefer targeting single segments over multiple at once, when deployed on your defense, they will target the purple wall, which is still breaking the same compartment, and that wastes some Walls because you doubled up the Walls just to divert the Wall Breakers, only to find out that they broke the compartment you wanted to protect. However, you can take advantage of the fact that these double walls divert Wall Breakers and use them to divert them away from a compartment you want to protect, see Figure 2 for an example. That Wizard Tower will be well-protected by the double walls because the Wall Breakers will target the purple Walls once again, and its splash will barely be unable to harm the walls surrounding the Wizard Tower! This means a harder time for Giants (etc.) to break through the Walls to destroy the Wizard Tower, meaning more time for your Wizard Tower to decimate nearby troops. Spiking Prior to the long foregone update that altered Wall Breaker AI, spiking was rather commonplace in Clash of Clans. It involves using single Wall pieces that would formerly attract Wall Breakers and lure attacking Wall Breakers to destroy them. Ever since the AI change, spiking became far less common but it is still used. You might be able to find some abandoned bases that still have these "spikes" in place, and some active ones, too (especially newer players that realize that there's no effect on Wall Breakers anymore). Pros of Spiking: *Pushes back spawning points of attacking troops, meaning that long-range defenses like Archer Towers or X-Bows may have more time to fire upon troops *Placing traps outside becomes a real ambush (it makes checking for traps more difficult because the attacker has to check over a larger area) Cons of Spiking: *It may be a waste of walls because you'll need Walls themselves for spiking *No longer lures Wall Breakers to destroy them I had my own personal opinion on this matter ever since I was a TH5. They are definitely no longer usable to make attackers waste their Wall Breakers, but still a great force-spawn, in fact it's probably your only one if you don't want easy percentage points going to lone Archers. I have seen some people force spawn with spiking, and even lost to some of them because of the Wall spiking messing up my troop deployment timing. Traps are definitely a big surprise here, some people do forget to check for outside traps before the real attack begins. SpikingGap1.png|Figure 3: Spikes, ordered in one of the most efficient ways possible. SpikingGap2.png|Figure 4: Notice that the purple Walls don't increase the spawn zone. How to Spike effectively: There's one concept that you may have realized before, and that is going to be very important here. That is the fact that all buildings visible to attackers (not Hidden Teslas nor traps) create a no-spawn zone, and troops cannot spawn within 1 tile of the aforementioned buildings. The only purpose of spikes nowadays is to create a no-spawn zone, and this will be covered here. If I place my "spikes" 2 tiles apart from each other as shown in Figure 3, '''all the spikes can cover a massive no-spawn zone. Not to mention, you can include a lot of traps (not shown here) in between your spikes. However, as shown in '''Figure 4, '''the extra spikes (shown as purple walls) do not increase the no-spawn zone. These extra walls are useless in that spiking layout, and can be used to protect as simply more walls to protect your base. Hence whatever is shown in '''Figure 3 '''is enough, any other walls not used in spiking should be used in protecting the rest of your base. The Wall Upgrade Priority There's no best way to upgrade your walls, but this is how I would recommend you to upgrade your walls, even though I don't follow that myself because I'm lazy and have the sort of OCD that all my walls has to be in some sort of line or something. Plus, it's for your benefit, not mine. '''Number 1: Junctions. '''Junctions, whether T-shaped or X-shaped, are your sort of connection between compartments. Without these junctions, all your compartments would be linked up all together, or opened up. Then, you would be a fresh target for ground attackers, especially GoWipe and GoWiWi. Do these junctions first, then followed up by all the walls directly adjacent to it (up to 4), and another wall further if you want to. This is because the Wall Breaker's splash damage could wipe out the surrounding Walls if it failed to break the junction wall itself, which still opens up the compartment anyways. Having one lone junction wall, in my opinion, is useless against anyone with Wall Breakers. It does slow down anyone without it, however. '''Number 2: Corners. '''These are probably the closest thing you'll see to junctions, there's not too much of an advantage in upgrading that, but bear in mind that players tend to attack from the corners rather than the edges because troops can be focused on one side, and if farmers reach halfway into a base with storages arranged in a plus (+) shape they'll get most of the storages attacking from the corner rather than the edges. The rest of the upgrade order is debatable, but presentable in this table. There's three layers of walls that I'd classify here: core (the innermost walls), mid-layers (says it all) and frontline (outermost walls in your base). Upgrading Walls Efficiently Do upgrade your Walls one at a time, all at the same level. Like defenses themselves, you want to balance the level of your walls to prevent enemies from spotting weak areas of your base. It's better to have a full set of level 7 Walls rather than one short line of level 10 Walls and having the rest no more than level 5. Yes, it's a pain to do each and every one of them but it'll be well worth it. Do upgrade them in a line, i.e. left to right, top to bottom or vice versa. Don't upgrade every other one in a polka-dot fashion as the picture on the right shows; Wall Breakers do have a splash component which means it can break open the weaker Walls if it fails to break the stronger ones. And breaking the weaker Walls = access to the compartment. Even without Wall Breakers, you're testing your luck to whether the ground troops go for the stronger Walls instead of the weaker. With polka dot Walls that chance is 50:50 and you won't be able to win defenses reliably. Upgrading them in a line, sure there'll be weaker protection for one side but you're guaranteed to get better protection for the other side. Oh, and when I mean having evenly upgraded Walls I mean that there should be at most three different levels of Walls that make up your base. '''An example of Good Wall Composition: '''180x level 7 Walls, 45x level 6 Walls '''An example of Bad Wall Composition: '''5x level 10 Walls, 150x level 6 Walls, 60x level 5 Walls, 35x level 4 Walls Wall Tricks So, these are some tricks you can pull off with your Walls (I know they are non-living things but who cares), to surprise your opponents in the best way possible. Funneling (without Traps) So, this is a trick to mess with troops by using knowledge of their AI to direct them into unwanted areas, like the defending radius of lethal splash towers like Mortars and Wizard Towers, or away from key defenses or storages. Basically, you want to purposely open up a gap in your Walls and let the splash defenses do the rest of the work. Shown in '''Figure 5, any troops deployed near the opening will be funneled into the gap, where they can be obliberated by splash defenses. This all works because you can exploit the AI of Barbarians, Archers and Goblins - Barbarians and Archers will target the closest building, whereas Goblins will target the nearest resource building. In my opinion, if using a similar layout shown in Figure 5, try to make the gap that they enter as small as possible, such that splash defenses will have maximum effect on these Tier 1 troops. Have the gap be at most five tiles wide, any bigger than that and splash defenses could have a hard time as Tier 1 troops are usually dispersed to avoid devastating splash damage. Likewise, you can funnel Giants/Golems away from key defenses, and Goblins away from storages. Without support from Wall Breakers, neither will choose to break a wall unless they really need to. See Figure 6 '''for a theoretical demonstration. This would be an example base simply for the purpose of demonstrating how Walls can really hinder enemy troops should they choose not to bring Wall Breakers. '''Giant Path (Protecting Wizard Tower) '''As shown in the red path, the Giants will go to the Cannon next to the Wizard Tower first, then the Archer Tower, other Cannon and Tesla before banging the walls surrounding the Air Defense. After the Air Defense gets taken down they will finally attack the wall surrounding the Wizard Tower while the Wizard Tower heavily damages the Giants while that happens. '''Goblin Path (Protecting Storage Compartment) '''As shown in the green path, the Goblins will target the two collectors close to the Wizard Tower, then proceed to run along, destroying the collectors before they attack the Walls containing the storages, all the while getting hammered by the defenses! As you can see, this trapless funneling system works perfectly for those who deploy at the zone indicated. If you include traps it could be made even more devastating. Funneling (with Traps) Basically, this is like funneling without traps, but this might be better, because traps can easily devastate entire groups of troops in one go. It's really easy to use, simply place your traps in between two buildings of similar type, however be sure that these traps are lethal, or else they can be almost useless. For example, Spring Traps in between two defenses will take out Giants or Hog Riders, whereas Spring Traps in between two storages can remove lots of Goblins . TrapFunnel1.png|Funneling with Spring Traps 1: As Giants destroy one defensive building, try to force them into a Spring Trap. TrapFunnel3.png|Funneling with Spring Traps 2: You can place Spring Traps at corners to spring off some Giants as well. TrapFunnel2.png|Placing three Bombs in between all of your storages is a great way to surprise enemy farmers. TrapFunnel4.png|Goblins deployed at the Gold Mine are in for a nasty surprise - great for protecting collectors. For Bombs, even the highest levels on their own cannot destroy troops encountered at that level. Do upgrade them to at least level 3, at a minimum. As you can see in the chart on the left, Bombs are extremely lethal against Tier 1 troops when upgraded to a high level. Those below level 4 are still reasonably cheap, compared to the other two levels, and a few is sufficient to kill most Tier 1 troops. Some examples of Bombs when funneling to kill Tier 1 troops are shown below. Wall Buffers No, this is not to be confused with buttresses, an outdated tactic that has no use except for possibly preventing you to place buildings there. Basically, you make Wall Breakers blow up another set of Walls in addition to the frontline Wall. Or, these buffers redirect Wall Breakers completely to other, less important compartments. Remember the Wall Breaker's AI: it will only target Walls when there are at least 3 of them in a line, and when the Wall is protecting a building. As you can see in '''Figure 7, the buffers mean that the Wizard Tower will be pretty hard to reach with Wall Breakers, considering it'll only attack either the junctions close to the storages or it'll be forced to cut through two layers of Walls to reach the Wizard Tower (which means it need reinforcements; one Wall Breaker can't cut through two layers of Wall at once when they're separated like this). Figure 8 '''shows a similar demonstration; it also works well as the Wall Breakers will either have to cut the junctions next to the collectors or get wasted under the Wizard Tower's fury. It also works on the other side - if attackers attack from the other side, they'll get a similar result (though Wall Breakers are extremely unlikely to cut beyond the core of a base, other ground troops like Giants will have to cut through at least two Walls to reach the Wizard Tower). Also, the wall buffer (unlike double Walls) prevents Archers from reaching the Wizard Tower itself in either case - great deterrent regardless of the position you implement the buffer. Beware, however, if the gap in between the buffer layer and the outer layer is 1 square - Archer Queens can reach and attack the buildings inside! However, if it's two or more (diagonals are counted as at least two) the AQ will have a hard time reaching them. Also, Jump Spells can easily negate the buffer layer, rendering the whole buffer system useless. WallBuffer2.png|Figure 7: A decent way to protect both your Wizard Tower and your corner. WallBuffer4.png|Figure 8: The same thing, but done on edges instead of corners. Still as decent. A great way to use your Wall buffers is to combine them with traps and well-placed Defensive Buildings, as shown in '''Figure 9. Any Wall Breakers coming in from the bottom of the base will go for the first layer of level 9 grey Walls. That's when your defenses come in and stop your Wall Breakers. As they approach the first line of Walls, Teslas pop up and possibly one-shot them - this will take out a considerable amount of Wall Breakers. Under a meatshield, as they finally breach the first layer of Wall, they get confronted again as they attempt to breach the second layer of Walls that holds the Mortar and Dark Elixir Storage; Spring Traps come into play and launch off some Wall Breakers as they aim for the adjacent buffer Walls. You can replace the Spring Traps for double Bombs at your own discretion; they may just destroy even more Wall Breakers. In conclusion, Double Bombs in front of vulnerable walls = Good Spring Traps in front of vulnerable walls = Good Defending your Walls Looking at the topic title, you're wondering: why would you need to defend your Walls when they are defenses? The simple reasoning to that is the fact that Walls are the only defensive building in your base that does not damage troops or kill them outright (excluding upgrading or unloaded ones, of course, but we are assuming an active maxed out player here). Hence you should not leave your Walls defenseless, otherwise these walls will easily be a ripe target for Wall Breakers. If you leave an entire compartment defenseless, theoretically any troop that does not have a preferential target could destroy the whole compartment singlehandedly. It's a really simple concept, because placing defenses would solely be enough to stop Wall Breakers from breaking your walls. I mean like, most defenses should be able to oneshot Wall Breakers at higher levels. But you have to factor in one more thing. Meatshields, like Giants or Golems. These meatshields can easily negate point defenses' work in stopping Wall Breakers. Splash damage defenses, however, does damage Wall Breakers or even destroy them before they can blow up your Walls that you spent millions, perhaps billions to work on. An alternative to defenses is using traps, these can be perhaps more efficient, but beware that you do have to rearm them after use. If you are planning to use them be sure that you do use them near Walls that are likely to be targeted by Wall Breakers. If you have the Inferno Towers at your disposal, you can also place it in range of your outermost Walls in multiple target mode, and it will destroy most Wall Breakers by itself. This table shows the pros and cons of the different methods to destroy Wall Breakers. Conclusion It's been a long but complete guide. Now that we are at perhaps the end of the guide, in the end I only have to say: Walls are a fundamental thing in Clash of Clans, and without them, I can say you're not going to have an easy time surviving in the Clash realm. They are both masterful in protecting your base, and masterful in helping you deceive the enemy. Hope this guide helped you out, thanks for reading.